“Wouldn’t take them?” he said, pulling a water bottle off the shelf and cracking it open. “You mean, she wouldn’t take free seeds? Why not?”
“Her excuse? She can’t garden.” Beth put the peanut butter back in the pantry. “The real reason? She doesn’t want to take care of herself. She wants someone else to take care of her.”
“Some people are never going to learn,” James said, then took a long swig of water. “They will be the real problem in the months and years ahead.”
Kaylee watched them intently as they spoke, nibbling on her sandwich. Beth wasn’t sure how much her granddaughter understood, but she stroked her hair to comfort her.
“Nora is still waiting for the government to fix everything,” Beth said, closing the jar of jelly. They had no working refrigerator, but the subbasement was cool enough to preserve the jelly for a while. She set it near the sink so she would remember to take it down there later. “The president promised, she said, he promised that they are solving the problem.”
“So her long-term plan is to keep begging,” James said, “then eventually resort to stealing.”
“Too stupid to survive,” Beth said. “That’s what she is. I guess this is my punishment for being nice. Shane tried to talk me out of it the first time, but I like helping people.”
James took another swig of water then stared at the ceiling, as if thinking deeply about something. Kaylee had finished her sandwich, and she hopped down off the stool. As she ran out of the kitchen, Bauer barked and ran after her.
“You know what we need to do?” James said. “We need to call some kind of town meeting. It’ll be easier to get everyone on the same page that way. Maybe we can lay down some ground rules.”
It was such a good idea that Beth almost reached out and hugged him. Instead, she merely squeezed his arm. “That’s exactly what we should do. Let’s get everyone to discuss the situation together. Maybe we can get a bunch of families to start gardening. How do we invite the whole town?”
James stroked his mustache for a moment. “I’m pretty sure the local high school has an old printing press in the journalism room. I could print up a bunch of flyers and deliver them around town. We’ll limit it to our community. No need to invite all of Macon.”
“Great idea,” she said. “Don’t go alone when you distribute them. I would help, but I probably shouldn’t leave the house again while Jodi’s still recovering.”
“I’ll take someone with me.”
They both turned to the dining room. Corbin was sitting at the table. He had taken Shane’s Glock apart, spreading the pieces out on the table before him. He picked up the barrel and began cleaning it with a small brush.
“Corbin,” James said. “I have a job for you.”
“I heard,” Corbin replied, without looking up. “Count me in, sir. Let me get this gun cleaned and oiled first.”
Beth laid a hand on the sheriff’s shoulder. “Do you think a town meeting will help? Will it really help?”
He hesitated a second before saying, “I think it’s a long shot—people are stubborn—but we can hope. We can always hope.”
19
Corbin didn’t like the sight of public school buildings. He’d had very few positive experiences inside them. Bad grades, frustrated teachers, obnoxious bullies, and pointless rules had dominated his school years, and it had only gotten worse in high school. The local high school looked like a thousand other school buildings, a big, squat rectangle of unlovely brown bricks and tinted windows. About two dozen vehicles were scattered across the parking lot like abandoned children, including a yellow school bus parked near the front doors.
They were in the sheriff’s old patrol car. It was a 2007 Crown Victoria, and Corbin was surprised it worked. Somehow its electronics had survived the EMP, but that was the capricious nature of the event. They parked close to the front doors of the school. As they got out, Corbin reached for his waistband, instinctively feeling for the handle of a gun, but he hadn’t brought a gun with him. Only the sheriff was armed. It made Corbin nervous. This was definitely an “open carry” world, and he felt at a disadvantage, even if they were just visiting the local high school.
“You think anyone’s going to be here?” he asked, stepping up onto the curb. “School has got to be on some sort of permanent break with everything that’s going on.”
“Not sure,” Sheriff Cooley said, checking each of the car’s doors to make sure they were locked. “School is not on break. Technically, it’s still in session, and they’ve got a few weeks until summer break. Of course, that doesn’t mean anybody will show up, but we’ll get in there one way or another.”
As they approached the front doors, Corbin saw some kind of faint flickering light through the tinted glass. Again, he reached for a gun that wasn’t there. Sheriff Cooley tried one of the doors and found it unlocked. When he swung it open, Corbin saw the fluorescent lights in the foyer were flickering, as if on the verge of dying. As he stepped through the door, he realized every light down the hall was doing the same thing.
“What’s the deal?” he wondered. “Are they getting power in here?”
The sheriff was out of uniform, dressed in a simple t-shirt and sweatpants, but he’d brought his badge. He pulled it out as he stepped inside, holding it up as if preparing to flash it to anyone who jumped out at them.
“Looks like the building is running on generators,” he said. “Fuel must be running out. Seems like kind of a waste to keep the lights on when there aren’t any people here.”
Just in front of them, big windows gave an expansive view of the administrative office, and it appeared to be empty. The hallway stretching off in front of them was empty as well.
“This is a little creepy, sir,” Corbin noted. “Are we sure it’s safe in here?”
“Well, I’m not really sure of anything, to be honest,” the sheriff replied. He had his holster clipped to his belt, and he eased his hand toward it as he moved down the hall. “Come on. The journalism room is this way.”
As they moved down the hall, passing one empty classroom after another, Corbin thought he heard some distant sound, possibly voices, but he couldn’t be sure. Were they singing? Chanting? Fighting? It seemed to be coming from another room, possibly somewhere on the far side of the building.
“Do you hear that?” Corbin asked.
James glanced at him. “I don’t know. I thought, maybe, for a second…My hearing’s not as good as it used to be. What is it?”
“Voices,” Corbin said. “Possibly a whole bunch of people. It seems far away.”
“Let’s not worry about it,” the sheriff replied. “For now.”
James stopped in front of a classroom door, turned the knob to see if it was locked, then swung the door open. Corbin had an immediate twinge of unease at the sight of a classroom. In this particular room, the desks were clustered together in groups of six. There was a long table near the windows and a row of computers against the back wall. Posters had been tacked up all over the place praising the wonders of journalism. One of them was a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson that said, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
So much self-important nonsense, Corbin thought, feeling bitter as he moved through the classroom door. Most of the students couldn’t care less anyway.
Sheriff Cooley gestured toward an old machine sitting on a counter in the far counter. It looked like an antique, a metal table of some sort with a big lever on one side and some kind of roller on top.
“Wow, that’s even better than a printing press,” the sheriff said, walking over and tapping the side of the machine. “Do you know what this is? This is a spirit duplicator. They must keep it around as sort of a museum piece. It’s got to be the only one left in the whole school system. I wonder if they still use it sometimes just for fun.”
“Do you know how to operate it?” Corbin asked. The constant flickering of the lights was starting to
bother him. It was like a form of low-grade torture, and he was sure it would give him a terrible headache if he lingered long enough in the building.
“It’s been a while, but I think so,” he said. “We can design the original flyer on one of the computers and print it out over there. Then we just pump out copies by the hundreds on this machine.”
He pointed to the computers against the wall and the big industrial printer at the end of the line. A stack of old school newspapers was balanced precariously on top of the printer. Corbin approached, picked up the stack, and set it on a nearby shelf.
“You think you could design the thing for me?” the sheriff said. “I’m not much for graphic design. I’ll jot down the relevant information.”
“I guess I can come up with something,” Corbin said, sitting down at one of the computers.
As the sheriff plucked a pencil off a student’s desk, Corbin attempted to boot up the computer. It didn’t respond, not to repeated button presses, not to holding down the power button for almost a full minute. Corbin tried the computer beside it and got the same response.
“Here you go,” the sheriff said, trying to hand him a scrap of notebook paper covered in barely legible scribbles. “This is the basic information we need to convey. Just make it look nice, so people will want to read it.”
“No point,” Corbin said, taking the piece of paper from him and tossing it onto the table. “The computers don’t work. Either they got fried or there’s just not enough power from the dying generators.”
“Okay, okay,” James replied, stroking his mustache with his fingers. “That’s fine.” He looked around. “Here. Over here.”
Corbin turned to follow as he walked across the room to an open cabinet. Inside, the shelves were lined with pens and pencils, markers, chalk, and many different kinds of paper.
“Maybe you can design something by hand,” James said. “It’ll be like the old days, right? Before all these fancy computers.”
“I’m not a great artist,” Corbin said, as the sheriff began pulling pens and colored pencils off the shelf. “I can barely draw stick people.”
“Well, you’ve seen my handwriting,” the sheriff said, taking a piece of white paper and tossing it onto a desk. “If I design the thing, nobody’ll have the foggiest idea what we’re trying to say. Come on, kid. It doesn’t have to be pretty. Just neat and legible.”
“Okay, fine.” Corbin grabbed the piece of scrap paper with the sheriff’s scribbles on it and crossed the room.
As the sheriff set up colored pencils on the desk, Corbin unfolded the scrap paper and attempted to make sense of the chicken scratch. “When are we having this meeting?”
“In two days,” James replied. “Right here at the high school, since it has generators. We should be able to find enough fuel to give us power for the town meeting. Do your best with the design, but don’t worry about it too much.”
The large piece of white paper that the sheriff had pulled from the cabinet proved to be a two-ply sheet with carbon paper attached to the back.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“We need that for the spirit duplicator,” the sheriff said. “You’ll see.”
Corbin went to work, trying to create consistent block letters, meticulously filling in each letter with the colored pencils. He made sure the date, time, and location were most prominent, and he even included a crude sketch of the front of the school building. At the top, in big red letters, he wrote, “Important Town Meeting!”
“That should get their attention,” he said, turning the paper so James could see it clearly. “What do you think?”
The sheriff examined the flyer a little longer than Corbin thought it deserved.
I told him up front I’m not much of an artist, so what are you staring at, old man?
Finally, the sheriff nodded and said, “Yeah, this’ll work. Of course, the spirit duplicator won’t reproduce all the colors.”
“Then why did you give me all these colored markers?” Corbin asked, annoyed.
“Just wanted to get your creative juices flowing,” James said. “Sit tight. I’ll print the copies. I haven’t seen one of these machines in action for years. Should be fun.”
James picked up the flyer and carried it over to the spirit duplicator. Corbin watched with fascination as the sheriff prepared the machine. When he held up the flyer, Corbin saw that the carbon paper had duplicated his design on the backside. James attached the sheet to the roller so the carbon copy was on the outside. Sadly, as the sheriff had said, none of his colors were present on the carbon side. The wasted time bothered Corbin.
“I should’ve just used a ballpoint pen,” Corbin said. “It would have saved a heck of a lot of time.”
And we could’ve gotten out of this building, and out from under these awful flickering lights, quicker.
“You did fine,” James replied. “Don’t worry about it.”
Searching through drawers, the sheriff found a stack of printer paper and placed it on a tray at the end of the machine. Then he began to crank the handle. From what Corbin could tell, the carbon copy of his original was pressed onto the white papers one sheet at a time. One by one, printed copies began to roll out the other end.
“We’ll keep going until the carbon wears off,” the sheriff said. “I’d like to get about five hundred, if I can.”
In the end, he managed to crank out roughly 475 copies before the carbon became too faint to read. He took the big stack of copies, pulled the original off the roller, and brought them to Corbin, setting them on the desk in front of him. The copies were ugly, in Corbin’s opinion, but he shrugged.
“Well, they can read it, I guess,” he said.
“That’s what matters,” the sheriff replied. “Good work.”
Corbin picked up the stack of copies and followed the sheriff out of the classroom, glad to leave it behind. He swung the door shut behind him. As they stepped into the hall, the lights gave one last weak flicker and went out.
Good, Corbin thought.
“There go the generators,” James said. “No more fuel, I guess.”
The sounds that Corbin had heard earlier were louder now, and it was clear to him that he was hearing voices, a hundred or more voices. The sound drifted down the hall and created a ghostly echo, as if he were hearing the voices of generations of the ghosts of former students.
“Do you hear it now?” he asked the sheriff.
“Oh, yeah, I definitely hear that.” James cocked his head to one side, as if trying to discern what the crowd was saying.
“We’d better get out of here,” Corbin said. “Whatever’s going on, we don’t need to be part of it.”
Plus, I’m unarmed, he thought, but did not say.
“Actually, seeing as I’m the sheriff,” James said, “I’d better check it out. I’ve got my gun and my badge. I just wish I’d brought my hat.” He ran a hand through his hair, combing a few stray strands back in place. “Left it in the bedroom after sleeping all morning.”
Why was he talking about his hat? What difference did a hat make when they were deliberately walking toward a loud disturbance? Corbin just didn’t completely understand Sheriff Cooley, and that only added to the discomfort he already felt being around someone in law enforcement.
They moved down the hall and past the office, then turned a corner, where the sound of the voices was much louder. They moved down another hall, and now Corbin could practically feel the noise thrumming in his chest. Ahead, he saw a sign above double doors that read, “Gymnasium.”
“Are you sure you want to go in there?” Corbin said. “Doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.”
“Yeah, we should.”
Although Corbin moved reluctantly toward the doors—the sound of high schoolers screaming and acting crazy touched some deep, primal fear in him—Sheriff Cooley approached boldly.
“Don’t you want to draw your gun?” Corbin asked him, speaking loudly to be heard over the rising cacophon
y.
The sheriff frowned at him. “Of course not. We’re in a high school.”
James hit the crash bar with his forearm and shoved one of the doors open. Instantly, Corbin had a view of absolute chaos. Students were running wild in the gym, and the floor was littered with junk food wrappers, empty and crumpled soda cans, water bottles, and trays from the cafeteria. The students had broken into the gym supply closet, and they’d tossed wrestling mats all over the place. A few of the mats were being used as makeshift beds. Others were being used to drag squealing students around. One of them had been hung in the rafters somehow.
“Oh, gosh,” Corbin said.
He came to a stop, ready to flee, but the sheriff stepped boldly through the door and began shouting. As it turned out he had a booming voice when he needed it, and his words carried across the gym, cutting through all of the screaming and laughing.
“What in the world is going on here?” As he shouted, he held up his badge. “Where is the principal?”
Most of the students looked in his direction, but only a few stopped what they were doing. Corbin saw a group of boys playing dodgeball in the corner with basketballs, another group playing tag on the bleachers. A group of girls was playing frisbee with plastic lunch trays. It was an absolute madhouse, and it stirred up something hateful in him.
“Where is the principal?” James shouted again.
A small circle of rather geeky-looking boys and girls was gathered in a shadowy spot near the end of the bleachers where sunlight from the high windows didn’t reach. One of them stood up, a girl in a mismatched blue sweater and flower-print skirt. She was clutching a deck of superhero trading cards in her hand. As she approached, Corbin noted that her hair looked greasy and unwashed, her face pimply and shiny.
“Sir, the principal isn’t here,” she said.
“Do you know where he went, young lady?” James said.
Surviving The End (Book 2): Fallen World Page 17